Walt/Mearsheimer and supporters: profound insensitivity to history of Jewish persecution

Submitted by S Silverstein MD (United States), Sep 15, 2007 at 11:45

This is the third iteration and it still has lots of basics wrong - starting with the fact that Campus Watch is not primarily focused on Israel but covers the gamut of Middle Eastern topics and going on to Campus Watch not being limited to a website but a full-blown project with activities unrelated to the Internet. (2) I can't wait to see how the second edition of their book continues to make errors, but this time with a fourth wording.

Such research is not hard. Undergraduates generall can get simple facts straight the first time. As Dershowitz first pointed out in his essay "Debunking the Newest – and Oldest – Jewish Conspiracy Theory: A Reply to the Mearsheimer-Walt Working Paper" here, informational errors are abundant.

One must consider the possibility of deliberate disinformation and disingenuity.

Here are some other points to ponder:

1. Walt and Mearsheimer could have written a book entitled, say, "Why it is not in the U.S. interests to maintain a special relationship with Israel ." This would probably not have raised charges of anti-Semitism if well-documented as to their reasoning (and by "well documented", I mean without informational errors - omissions, distortions, quoting secondary sources only when the primary source expressed a different opinion, etc.

2. Instead, they chose a book whose title and major theme suggests excessive Jewish influence, a charge others have made for centuries (usually as a polemical predlude to pogroms and genocide). In doing so, and being aware of history themselves (hopefully), they should have taken the utmost care to get their facts correct. The first time. With the informatics capabilites made possible by information technology, how hard is this to do?

(Allow me to answer my own question. I was Director of the scientific research libraries and IT group at an multinational pharmaceutical company, and helped design information-seeking IT tools for the Yale-New Haven Medical Center. It's not hard to get the facts straight in biomedicine, and it's not hard in the humanities, either.)

3. A reading of the rebuttal links at , say, http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=8&x_nameinnews=189&x_article=1105 or even Dershowitz' response alone to their paper should convince any reasonable person that there were serious structural, factual, contextual, and logical errors sufficient to possibly invalidate the professor's research and its conclusions.

4. A major point: Walt and Mearsheimer have been insensitive to the response of the Jewish community, a response based on solid history - a solid history of atrocities often instigated by polemical, anti-Semitic writings. In fact, it has been suggested they expected and sought this response as a "trap" to validate their ideas that any charges raised against Israel cause "labelling" as an anti-Semite. In fact, it is the focus on a cabal that has been the principal cause of that repsonse. Their accusations need to be evaluated in the context of history, and failure to do so in judging the response of the Jewish community to their work is an insensitivity itself that can be reasonably be construed as Jew hatred if it continues after this is pointed out to a person.

5. A work like Walt and Mearsheimer's "Lobby" publications are not an appropriate mechanism to "open discussion" on the relationship between the US and Israel, just as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" was not . Walt and Mearsheimer destroyed their privilege to be considered objective by their tendentious tone and numerous, repetitive errors, errors that in scientific research would lead to charges of research fraud. Just as with works like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or articles in Der Sturmer, their work is only suitable for opening an examination of why their research on this topic is so lousy.

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